Note: if you just want the recommended hosting instead of reading the full story, go to the last line of the article
After to have fight for long time searching a decent hosting where to put the Elive website, my frustration and time lost was so big that I always wanted to write something about it
Note: Since it is not my intention to make bad publicity, I won't mention here the companies on which I had bad experiences
Shared hosting experience
First, I started using a very known shared hosting service, the features were promising, unlimited everything: unlimited websites, disk space, network transfer... all for only 100 $ / year, amazing!
The experience was not bad, a friendly website panel where to configure and set up everything in a very easy way, perfect for novices and fast configurations, perfect for misc usage... but when I needed to set up the wordpress for the Elive website, oh damn! this thing is painfully slow! This was not the 100% of the time, but a good amount of it! let's say that a 5% of the time it turned in a nightmare of slowness, in other words, totally unacceptable speed
Even worse: there was limitations in different things, for example:
- you have unlimited disk size but you cannot use it for store misc things, only for websites purposes, this means for example a debian repository is not allowed too because is not exactly a website purpose
- you are limited to send 100 or 500 emails per day, they do that in order to avoid spam, if you want more you need to follow some guidelines which I didn't had the time to
Anyways, the hosting was good for misc things and fast setups, for the price is a very good way to set up some web misc things
VPS hosting experiences
An VPS is a virtual machine sell as an own hosting, is not exactly a full computer (not all the resources for you) but it is meant that you have some reserved resources dedicated only for you
That was a perfect solution that I was searching for, an own machine where I can setup it as how i like, having root access, I can install any package that I want, customize as I wish, install any server or its version or any software without limits, just like my own machine
Now the problems:
I searched for the best recommended hosting VPS's and It was truly amazing for my experience how much problems I had with them, there was a ton! but basically:
- network outages
- the machine become slow without reason (that should be because is shared externally)
- machine lags
- you have root but you have permission denied for a few strange things
- slowness again!
- unreliable! in every sense!
I tried like 3-4 of the best recommended hostings and I only had headaches, until I finally found the good one:
The good VPS choice!
I can talk about its features, but let me start by what I consider the most important things:
- it is pretty cheap, like 5$ / month, similar to other alternatives but being a damn good one
- it is reliable, perfectly reliable, 100% reliable, DAMN! this is a single thing strictly needed for any server purpose that seems like not much others have easy to provide!
- no slowness, no lags, it doesn't become slow in any moment, it doesn't has network outages... again, simply reliable, in every sense
- no "fake" vps limited or similar, I have root, and I can mount a swap partition too or even reformat the provided disk
A few features now:
- You have console access from their web, I mean, yeah! just like a web application, which shows you the machine booting and even the grub process, this is an amazing thing in cases that your machine becomes unreachable because of firewall rules or similar things!
- resizing features, you can increase or decrease the resources in any moment
- cost is based in time, which means you can resize the box for only 10 minutes to try something and return back to the normal size later, it will cost you almost nothing, instead of being charged for a full month
- the web interface is pretty simple and easy to use
- snapshots of machine, recovery, renaming, moving to another country, etc...
Actually, the Elive website has been hosted with them for more than 5 years and I have no any complains! (except for the bandwidth over bill with the impact of the 3.0 release, but fortunately I seen soon the email alarm notification that I had configured, so it didn't grow more)
So if you are searching for a good and reliable hosting, one that won't give you headaches, give to this one a try, I personally suggest you it
Note: I'm not saying that this is the best hosting, I'm just talking from my own experience in trying multiple ones, so please be free to comment this thread suggesting other ones if you have better recommendations! 
Referrals:
https://www.vultr.com/?ref=8933113 - Use this code as a general bonus referral
https://www.vultr.com/?ref=9024389-8H - Use this code that includes a special offer if available!
If you want to try it, make sure to use the previous referral link, so Elive will be directly benefited from it (with a 25 $ bonus for the next hosting bills), but you even more! with 100 $ free bonus which you can use for 2 months
